Moving a step ahead in the Industrial Internet domain, General Electric Co has joined forces with Amazon Web Services. With this alliance, GE and AWS will work on making a wide range of data on products, including jet engines and gas turbines available online and analyze them. This well connects developers and engineers as developers will have to work with engineers to understand and collect the data coming out of the analysis.

For example, in case of aircraft engines the connection of aviation engine sensors with computer networks can help predict catastrophic engines failure; for wind farms, the connection of wind turbine sensors to the Internet can help providing resilience in the case of catastrophic failure of other parts of the power grid.

“It is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data,” said Bill Ruh, vice president for GE’s global software center.

GE is pretty much focused on Industrial Internet these days. And clearly, this alliance with AWS, along with partnerships with IT infrastructure company Pivotal and consultant Accenture has made GE officially a Big Data firm. Not long ago, GE partnered with Accenture and Pivotal. By leveraging these new partnerships, GE aims to position itself as a leading player in an industry that’s expected to be worth around $1.2 trillion by 2020, as reported by Wikibon. Revealing the goals of its relationship with Pivotal, GE informed that Pivotal will speed up the development of advanced analytic services for the Industrial Internet. The partnership aims to jointly develop and deploy Industrial Internet solutions by leveraging Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, in-memory and Hadoop-based technology, and supporting GE’s strategy of bringing consumer-grade capabilities to the enterprise.

As GE also invested in Pivotal, it’s pretty much clear that GE is now entering the Big Data race not only as a practitioner but also as a Big Data investor. Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante also stated that it is basically an effort to instrument the entire world as a Big Data practitioner, by taking Big Data from all these connected devices and have its own developers handling Big Data analytics make sense of all the gathered information.